SMA: A Few Other Things

It has been a while since we posted partly because of an apparent lack of time and partly because not a lot has been happening.  This isn’t strictly true since of course lots has been happening it just seems mundane and thus we have not been inspired.

Several weeks ago in the lead up to the shopping frenzy called Christmas we went out to a local village, La Cienaguita, to visit a house owned, built and decorated by an eccentric pair of expat artists sometimes known as “The Wizards” for their clothing, long beards and pointy hats (always a dead give away for wizards).  The house is pretty spectacular, overwhelmingly decorated in bright, colorful mosaics:

After an hour mostly spent hanging out and avoiding epileptic fits we headed back into town for an ice cream.

A few days later we joined our friends Kit and Roy for sunset cocktails at Casa Linda followed by dinner at Pegaso and our first Posada.  Posada’s are a reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s travails finding a motel for the night in the Roman provinces.  A procession goes from Church to Church, one pair each night, for seven nights. At each end-point Church a room is asked for and denied (mais bien sur).  The assembled children and adults who have ben walking along singing hymms and such are fated with ponche (fresh made apple cider), tamales, and candy.

 

The day before meeting up with Kit and Roy I went cycling with Javier and the guys.  We tooled out into the Campo as usual and wound up passing by an ancient damn (una presa) built almost three hundred years ago

The day wasn’t exactly warm and beautiful but we did have a great ride wandering randomly down dirt roads for six hours past villages, isolated houses, horses, a monastery, the town Atotonilco which has an amazingly decorated church and finally back to San Miguel.

Christmas Eve, Darcie and I rented quad motorcycles with our friend Kim and her son Grant.  We spent the whole day wandering around the Campo racking up a total of 50 miles or so.

Our yellow beast really inhaled the gas.  We only started off with a little over half a tank but even so 50 miles didn’t seem like much but we still managed to run out of gas about 3 miles from San Miguel.  Luckily Grant was able to run into town and bring back a pint of gas which was enough to get us back to the rental agent.  We also picked up a flat tire but the tires are so stiff that they worked just fine. They were just a little slippy.

Christmas came upon us after a late night having dinner with new friends followed by a couple of hours milling around with other friends in the Jardin (the main town square) in the hopes that something might happen at midnight (we never made it to midnight as fatigue and margaritas caught up with us).  We did get to see the live animals populating the crèche:

Christmas Day was beautiful and sunny and filled with general laziness on our part and the cooking of a turkey and so on.  I tried my hand at making sopes as an appetizer.  Sopes are handmade tortilla “boats” and are made by rolling a small ball of massa (corn dough) and then flattening it into a pancake about 1/4 inch thick or so.   These are then warmed over a hot comal until malleable at which point the edges are turned up to form the “boat”.  The boats are then quickly fried, drained and then filled with whatever your favorite topping is – in our case I tried huitlacoche and mushrooms with a garnish of red pepper and avocado.

They were a great success – none were left.

The following day we had mimosas with John and Yaya made with cava and hand-squeezed orange/mandarin juice and then all four of us hopped into John’s car and we went off to the nearby town of Pozos which is a former mining town now decaying and dissolving back into the earth. 

Former mines litter the landscape and of course the landscape needs to be treated with care since there has been little effort made to close up the yawning mine shafts

  The town itself lacks all of the charm of San Miguel despite the hopes of local real estate agents and certain expats that have invested in the town, vainly it seems.  The one charming find in the town was a local musical instrument maker of Chichimec Indian origin who makes instruments from pre-Cortes times

And that was Pozos!